


also, the angels

by anomalocaris



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky and Natasha Are Trying Very Hard to be Decent People, Canon-Typical Violence, Captain America: Civil War, Captain America: Civil War Spoilers, Department X, Espionage, F/M, General Tag for Canon-typical Red Room/Winter Soldier Dehumanisation/Identity Issues, Post-Civil War, Unfortunately Everyone Wants Them Dead, espionage thriller
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-06
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-06-06 17:31:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 12,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6763384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomalocaris/pseuds/anomalocaris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He has this dream. He is not supposed to be dreaming, but he dreams all the same. </p><p>Or: Bucky Barnes really isn't having a great year.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Final warning: major spoilers for the ending of Civil War within. If you haven't seen the film, or care about spoilers, maybe don't read yet. Come back later. It'll still be here, promise. 
> 
> Title from Margaret Atwood.

the more i study

your monster’s ribs, the more

i think: someday i will build beauty

out of an evil mass

i will

i too

-osip mandelstam, "notre dame"

_He has this dream. He is not supposed to be dreaming, but he dreams all the same._

_It’s always the same dream, like it’s the only thing his mind can access. Like a radio stuck on one frequency, the announcer reading out the same sequence of numbers, over and over again. Like a switch that can’t be turned off. His whole body feels like that, sometimes._

_He has this dream, and it starts with the snow. Every time, it starts with the snow._

_There is the snow, and there is the cold, too, and it is the kind of cold that kills. It spreads out around him, quiet and still except where the imprint of his body has disturbed it. It is very white. It hurts to look at. Beyond the snow: the trees, which are like teeth. The lonely, skeletal larches, crowded all around, stretching out their fragile defleshed hands. The fir, and spruce, and pine, still green but bowed and silent beneath the weight of the snow, twisted into hunched and crooked shapes. Beyond the trees: the sun, which is winter-dim and pale, faraway._

_He, too, feels faraway. He is aware of the scene as if from a distance, as if he has retreated to some remote and foreign country he has built inside himself. Here is the snow. Here are the trees. Here is his body, and here is his blood. There is a lot of blood. It’s all over him. It’s all over the snow, too, scattered like strawberries. It’s already started to congeal, red and thick and warm: a deep red, the colour of fruit smashed and boiled for jam in distant homely kitchens, of childbirth, of the blood that comes from the heart, from the delicate line of the neck, when you put a knife in it._

_His body, the one that is full of blood, is all broken-up and ruined. Important things are displaced—a lung, a liver, a rib. Important things are missing—a limb, a tongue, memory. These are things that other people have. He wants to scream. He wants to scream, but his lungs won’t fill, his mouth won’t work. The pressure on his chest is immense and awful, like he’s trapped deep underwater, the far-off surface frozen over. He is so cold. He can’t make his limbs move. Birds huddle in the branches, watching._

_Crows, he thinks. What does he know about crows? Only that they pick the dead clean. There’s intelligence in their eyes. Animal eyes. There are animal eyes all around him. He wants to turn his head, to look, but all he can do is stare straight up, at the branches, at the sky. The growling starts, low and familiar and terrible, and still he stares, heart like a rabbit in a trap and saltwater pricking at his eyes and turning to ice._

_The wolves are quiet, otherwise, like wolves should be. Sometimes they break a branch. He considers this variation a comfort.  He can’t see them, not until the end, only feel them. Their presence is vast, bigger than any wolf ought to be, and primal, and full of judgement. Their fur bristles, their lips curl, their teeth snap. The wolves howl and so does the wind, shrieking and rushing past his ears, filling his chest with something terrible, where the heart should be._

_Their ranks part, like soldiers, and out steps the girl. She comes closer on silent bare feet, in her little pale blue dress, and kneels down by him, her strawberry-red hair brushing his skin. Then she grins wide with all her teeth, and places one small hand on his shattered breastbone, and pulls out a knife._

_She looks at him, and he looks at her, and her eyes are yellow and wrong and inhuman, and her teeth where she smiles are very white. They gleam like blades, like porcelain, like shell casings, and terror surges up through him, and he wants to scream, and only a strangled sound comes out. She hushes him, very gently, and runs her hand through his hair, and begins to sing._

Alouette _, she sings, her voice clear and bright and cheerful._ Alouette, gentille alouette.

_She raises the knife._

Alouette, je te plumerai. Je te plumerai le cou.

 _She brings the knife down and he wants to scream and she’s going to cut his throat right here if he can’t make his frozen body move._ Je te plumerai le cou _, and the knife breaks his skin, the skin that is his, and the blood runs down to settle in the hollow of his clavicle, and_ et le cou, et le cou _—_

_With every ounce of the strength he can summon from his cold-numbed body, he strikes out._

The glass gives way with a terrible crash, and Bucky goes with it.

He lands hard and awkwardly, broken shards all around him, expecting the counterbalance of a limb that isn’t there. Glass bites into his palm and his bare knees. He’s too numb to feel it. He draws in sucking gasping breaths and tries to stop his head from spinning, tries to get his bearings. God, he’s cold all over. He has ice in his hair. He wants to be sick. He knows from experience that it’s the antifreeze. Dimethyl sulfoxide. He’s—

He’s very, very definitely not alone.

There are five men staring at him and the broken glass in stunned silence. Dark and heavy clothes. Long decades of experience and quicker reflexes than should quite be possible tell Bucky three things at once: that their uniform outfits are exactly that, _uniforms,_ which makes them either military and pretending not to be or mercenaries who just found themselves in very, very over their heads; that at least three of them have firearms under their jackets; that the thickness of said jackets means it is very cold out.

They’re sitting on overturned milk crates clustered around a folding table, covered in poker chips and half-empty bottles of vodka. Long narrow room. Naked light fixture swinging from the ceiling; wind rushing by outside. Familiar rattling that makes him want to be sick. On a train, then. Definitely not anywhere in Africa, which means—

Bucky glances behind him. The door of the cryo tank is swinging on its hinges where he beat his way through it and into consciousness. Well, shit.

He turns back to the men.

“Hi, fellas,” he croaks.

One of them drops their cigarette in shock.

There’s a second where they just stare at each other, Bucky and the soldiers.

Bucky recovers first.

On instinct he grabs one of the larger shards of glass by his feet. Reinforced glass, which means it breaks into small pieces with blunt edges, usually. Not much use unless you’re desperate.  Just as well he’s that.

It still has an edge to it and it bites into his palm, blood welling up around it. He’s still too cold to feel it. He thinks fast: five of them and one of him. The one second from the left is going for a gun. The one on the far right is about to scream for help.

Bucky twists his face into a snarl. Neither of them will succeed.

He ducks and rolls to the side just as the one on the left fires his gun, emptying his clip in a panic, bullets thudding into the glass and steel of the tank behind him. Bucky goes in low for the one on the right, bringing him down with a knee to the crotch and the full weight of his body: and, wishing desperately that he didn’t have to, sticks his makeshift knife firmly into the meat of the man’s throat. It goes in slowly. Too small for what he wants it to do; too blunt. Doesn’t matter. He’ll be dead anyway.

In one swift movement he jerks the knife and himself upwards. It drags a little, sliding through flesh with a gurgling sound as air escapes, but it stays in the body and the body comes too. Blood pours out over his hand. Bucky tugs the corpse towards himself, a human shield, just as the other men recover their wits and fire their sidearms. He counts the shots as they come: two, five, nine, twelve. Empty. The remains of their comrade jerk as the bullets hit it, a cruel imitation of life.

He throws it down and charges them.

Bucky knocks two of them flat and kicks one, as an afterthought, in the direction of the third; the man’s ribs stave in with an awful sickly _crack_ as he crashes into his friend, who crashes first into the wall and then right through it. Neither will be getting up anytime soon.

That leaves one. He rolls across the floor with the survivor, each of them grappling for purchase. He manages to headbutt his opponent. Then he gets a hard kick to the ribs and grunts, surprised. A good opening. Bucky finds himself underneath the other man and thinks, instinctively, _chokehold, get the arm around his neck and choke him, choke him till he passes out, you need him alive,_ before he remembers: he doesn't have the arm. Not anymore. That was taken from him. Everything is, in the end. He still has another one, though, and that will work just fine. He grabs one of the milk crates--makeshift chair, now a makeshift weapon--and slams it as hard as he can into the side of the man's head. The plastic shatters into pieces. It buys Bucky another second, and that's all he needs. 

Bucky flips them again, and this time he lands on top. He sees the man struggling to reach a tiny pistol, unnoticed or uncared for in the earlier fight, abandoned close by where the two of them landed. Fell out of his jacket, Bucky supposes. Last resort. Probably only one bullet in it. Bucky wonders briefly which one of them he had planned to use it on. 

"Not a chance," Bucky says, and snatches it up, aiming it with a grip that wavers slightly from the cold right between the eyes of the--woman. Oh. His opponent is a woman: dirty blonde hair, high cheekbones, a rough face. She's bleeding. He broke her nose with the milk crate. 

"Surprised?" she says, weakly. 

"Nope." He clicks the safety off. 

“You’re sloppy,” Bucky says. His voice is dull but he can feel fury, unchecked, bubbling up in him. “Shouldn’t have wasted your clip. Who hired you?”

“Fuck you,” says the woman.

“Who hired you?”

“ _Fuck_ you.”

Bucky presses the gun harder against her forehead. “Listen, asshole. Fifteen minutes ago I was having a nice fuckin’ nap in the middle of the most secure fuckin’ country on the planet. Now I’m here, and all your idiot pals are dead. Tell me what’s going on. _Who hired you?_ ”

She grins at him, crooked, blood welling out from her split lip. She licks it away. “They said you’d be trouble. Winter Soldier.”

He tenses up. “Who’s they?”

“You’ll find out,” she says; licks her lips again. Runs her tongue along her teeth. “Quick enough.”

“What is that, why are you doing that—” Bucky starts to say, and realizes the answer in a cold rush before he can finish. “Oh, no. Oh, fuck you.”

She grins again.

“Don’t you fucking _dare_ ,” Bucky snarls, angry now, truly angry. He drops the gun and grabs her jaw and wrenches it open, forces his hand inside, trying to grab the capsule before she can break it. She bites him even though he can barely feel it from the cold. Her teeth slip on his knuckles. For one moment he sees the capsule itself—innocuous, a tiny little cylinder of glass and white powder; they used to give them to the other agents but they had their own ways of putting him down, if they ever needed to—but she’s fast, and Bucky might be strong but he’s clumsy, from the cold of the tank, and with a tiny crunching sound she breaks the capsule and swallows the contents. “No, don’t you dare! Don’t you dare, you motherfucker, you goddamn motherfucker—”

It’s too late, of course. A trace amount of potassium cyanide will kill you in just under five minutes; a capsule the size of the one she just swallowed means she’ll be dead in less than one. It’s a quick death, but it’s ugly. Painful.

Bucky grabs the handgun from where it fell near them. “Tell me and I’ll make it easy for you. Who are you working for?”

Her eyes flick to it and then to his face. She makes a gurgling sound: he thinks it’s getting to her already, that he misjudged the dose, but then he realises with a jolt of impotent fury that she’s laughing.

Heedless of the gun he grabs her hair, pushes her roughly against the floor. Through gritted teeth he says, “Tell me.”

Blood and saliva drools from the corner of her mouth. She spits it at him. “Когда он поднимается, силачи в страхе, совсем теряются от ужаса.”

Something in him goes abruptly small, and cold. “What does that mean,” he says, low.

No answer.

“What the fuck does that mean—”

She’s dead already, mouth slack, staring off into nothing.

He clambers off the body, gun still in hand.

Then, with a creak and a groan, the roof gives in.

Bucky acts on instinct.

Some well-hidden animal part of him, the part they put there long ago, wakes up and he kicks at the forgotten table before he can think about it, so that it overturns on its side facing the sound of the crash and he can duck behind it. The bottles of vodka break as they hit the ground, liquid splashing his knees. Debris from the sudden hole in the ceiling clatters down around him. Plaster dust in his hair. Controlled detonation, probably on the roof. The person who set it off tosses a rope down through the new opening. Reinforcements. Of course they’d have reinforcements. He aims the gun at the intruder and wills his hand not to shake from the cold and hopes against hope that he doesn’t have to fire and—

Bucky blinks. “Black Widow?”

The Black Widow lowers her own gun, which she had a moment ago been aiming very neatly right between his eyes. She slides down the rope and drops, catlike, into a crouch, small sidearm holstered and back at her hip before she even hits the ground. There's snow in her red hair, which is tied tactically out of her eyes, and more blowing in from the hole she blasted in the roof, scattering across the floor. She's wearing dark civilian clothes. A motorcycle jacket. Woollen gray scarf.

She looks incredibly harried and he can't figure out why, until she looks at him warily and says, "That you in there, Barnes?" and he realizes he still has his stolen gun pointed at her.

"Oh." He lowers it. "Yeah."

She relaxes. “Well,” she says, lightly. “This is where I’d usually say _don’t worry, I’ve come to rescue you,_ but. Looks like you took care of that all by yourself.”

“Okay,” says Bucky. “What the hell is going on?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well! This piece was a long time coming. It was originally written many, many months ago as a sequel to [ and in which darkness](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3584862), but that plan had to be abandoned thanks to a minor plot point in that fic (the existence of a particular character) being jossed by Civil War. Though it can still be read in large part as a sequel, I'm a stickler for canon and won't be tagging it as such. You guys do what you want.
> 
> I've also never published something in chaptered format before. I was champing at the bit to get something up after the release, what can I say.
> 
> I can also be found on [Tumblr. ](http://www.predatories.tumblr.com)


	2. Chapter 2

“I don’t know,” says the Black Widow, and means it. It is, Bucky suspects, a rare occurrence. “Not exactly. You could have left one of them alive, you know.”

She means the soldiers, if that is what they were. Lesser soldiers. No capital letters for them. A quiet, wild laugh bubbles up like a spring from Bucky’s chest at this. God, he feels sick. He slumps back heavily against the cracked wood of the table, breath smoking in the frigid air.

“I’m glad you think it’s so funny,” says the Black Widow—she has a name, normal people get names; what’s hers?—and steps delicately over shards of glass and new splashes of still-warm blood, touching her fingers to the throats of the dead. Checking for a pulse. “I had questions for them.”

“Last one had a cyanide tooth,” Bucky says.

The Black Widow looks up, something strange flashing across her face. “Really?”

“Maybe they all did. Just didn’t get a chance to use it. I didn’t mean to kill them, y’know.”

“You tossed this one through a wall.”

Bucky shrugs. The adrenaline is wearing off, now. Without it he feels sick and shaky, teeth chattering, body aching as his blood warms up. Every part of him feels like a bruise. He closes his eyes and tips his head back. “Me or them,” he says, quietly.

“I know. I’m not judging you, believe me.” Her voice moves a little farther away. “But we could have used some more information.”

Bucky shivers involuntarily; draws his knees up to his chest to try and keep some heat in. It’s always like this, the waking. “Where are we,” he says.

“Austria,” she says, and he wants to laugh again, because of course they are. “Maybe Switzerland, now. I’ve been following you—or your box, anyway—for a while now. They didn’t know it had a tracking device in it, when they took it.”

“They?”

“Hired hands from Kinshasa, originally. They made it as far as Dar es Salaam before the Panther caught up with them. I very much doubt they’ll see another sunrise. But they’d passed their cargo along by then, and wouldn’t—or couldn’t—say to whom. As if they had no memory of the whole thing.”

Bucky shivers again, and not from the cold.

“But,” says the Black Widow, “like I said, there was a tracking device. It put you somewhere in central Europe, provided they hadn’t already woken you up. I happened to be in Europe.” He can hear a smile in her voice. “So here I am.”

So here they are.

With his eyes closed Bucky just listens, for a while: to the hum and rattle and roar of the train as it moves them along through the dark, the rattle that is as familiar as the scents of childhood to him now; to the electric whine of the failing cryo tank; to the Black Widow’s quiet footfalls as she moves among the dead; to the wolfish howl of the snow-laden wind outside.

“This tank,” says the Black Widow, eventually, whose name he has given up trying to remember. “Any idea what temperature it’s supposed to operate at, normally?”

Fighting a fresh wave of nausea, Bucky swallows and says, “Two hundred below. Celsius. Why?”

“I think I found the problem. The internal regulator’s at sixty below right now. Right at the limits of human survivability, which would be why you woke up. Must have damaged it moving you.”

“Oh,” says Bucky, and then: “I’m gonna be sick.”

He _is_ sick, immediately afterwards.

There’s nothing in his stomach for him to actually throw up, but his worn-out body tries its damnedest regardless. He lurches to the side, head spinning, and spits out a yellow-pale mess of bile and cryopreservants. His belly hurts after, muscles cramping, and he has to just kneel there, retching with his hair in his eyes, trying not to black out.

A low voice chides him. “Look at you,” says the Black Widow, very close by, and he sags against her gratefully when she tugs him in that direction, dizzy. She drapes something heavy over his shoulders. Shoulder. “Idiot boy. Can tell you grew up with Steve.”

“Unh,” Bucky says, and shivers.

“Lift your arm,” she says, and he obeys without thinking. She settles a jacket over him, thick and warm, doing up the buttons with the distanced care of the physician. He should be embarrassed. He’s pretty sure he’s barely dressed. He can’t remember, exactly, what it was he went under wearing, but it wasn’t much.

“Sorry,” Bucky mumbles, teeth chattering. “It’s—it’s always like this, when they don’t—when they don’t wake me up right.”

He feels feverish with the sudden temperature change, which must be why he's certain, though a hypothermic haze, that she hushes him and says, lowly, “I know.”

“What,” he manages to say; blinks blearily at her. Her red hair falls over the curve of his shoulder like blood. The wind howls like a wild thing in his ears and he remembers her name, all in a rush.

“We need to get out of here,” says the woman who now calls herself Natasha Romanoff. “Can you stand?”

“I—yeah,” he says. “I think.”

She pulls his arm over her shoulder and helps him up. Dark spots dance in front of his eyes once he’s vertical again, but he doesn’t faint. It never lasts long, the initial effects. He knows. He remembers. “I cleared the other cabins before this one,” says Natasha, which is a nice way to talk about killing. “But that doesn’t mean they won’t have reinforcements. I would, if I had a supersoldier as cargo.”

Cargo. That’s all he is, to everyone. Just an object, to be stored away when not of use. He wishes Steve were here. “Weapons,” he says, thinking about his bleeding hand, about the gun he’d dropped. “If they come after us I can’t—I can’t be weighing you down.”

Natasha smiles a little, a hard _you won’t_ smile. “Not a problem. First things first, though.” Her smile changes shape. “I think you need to put some actual pants on.”

Bucky blinks, flushes red, and looks down at himself.

He's got the ill-fitting jacket she gave him--dark thick khaki; he thinks she must have taken it from one of the dead men--on over the white wifebeater he'd gone under wearing weeks ago, and simple cotton shorts to lend him a little veneer of modesty for whenever they woke him up again, but that's all. He curls his bare toes. There's definitely some glass stuck in his feet; there's blood smeared all over them. It's a sight, for sure.

"Uh," he says. "I don't s'pose you--"

"I don't carry jeans around with me on ops, no. Definitely not in a men's extra large."

"Right," says Bucky. "Yeah. Obviously."

"I wouldn't despair just yet, though," she says, and looks at the carnage around them with a considering gaze. "Alright, Soldier: how do you feel about grave robbing?"

Pretty good, as it turns out.

He takes the clothes and the boots of the largest man, most likely to fit him out of all of them but probably still too small, with a muttered apology that's really meant for any listening angels more than the dead mercenary, who had after all tried to shoot him in the head. She turns away to let him dress, pulling a shitty plastic burner phone out of her jacket and tapping some unknown message into it. He’s grateful: for the privacy, sure, but for the quiet confidence she has in him, also. Before he went under—during those long few summer weeks spent licking their wounds in a palace by the shores of the Indian Ocean—Steve had followed him around like a shadow; like the loyalest of hounds. _Do you need help, Bucky,_ he’d say, and Bucky sure did, but not when it came to tying his fucking shoes or folding his laundry. _I can get that for you, Bucky. Let me do that._ Bucky thinks it was the guilt that got to him. Ate him up inside. Guilt tends to do that.

He feels a little ill, still, faint with hunger more than anything, and it makes his hand shake and means he has to stop and lean against the wall of the carriage halfway through, but in the end he manages just fine. _Ma would be so proud,_ he thinks, vaguely bitter, and laughs.

“Something funny?” says Natasha, not turning around.

"Long story," he says, with a wicked grin that she cannot see. He finishes tugging his borrowed boots on and gets, with a little awkwardness, to his feet. The boots are too big; the jacket too small. It's tight across the chest. He can't do anything about the empty sleeve; just rolls it up as best he can. He can pin it up properly later. He huffs and tugs at the hem of his shirt. "Okay, lady. Where's your getaway car?"

She looks at him. He thinks he sees a flash of approval in her gaze, and he shifts a little, preening and pleased. There's something of the young cad he used to be, before the war, in him still. "About twenty miles behind us."

He blinks. "I thought you had a jet."

"That wouldn't have been very subtle," she says, dryly amused. 

"How--how'd you get up here?" 

"I jumped," she says. "From a bike. You and Steve don't have a monopoly on stupid ill-thought-out stunts, you know."

Bucky cracks an entirely unexpected grin. "I like you."

She helps him up onto the roof of the train. There are a lot of things he can do just fine, without the arm, but pulling himself up a rope is not one that comes easily without practice. The grip of her hand on his is warm, and dry, and startlingly strong, and it's cold enough in the open air that he misses it once it's gone. Snow blows into his face and whips his hair around. 

It's dark out. The night sky is heavy with clear winter stars, heedless of the obeisance demanded by light pollution. The Milky Way curls above their heads like a mist. Snow-heavy fields spread out around them, the dark formless shapes of mountains in the distance. Bucky knows this sort of countryside well. He has killed many men in fields like these ones. The train rattles like a restless animal underneath him. He thinks of Austria, and shivers, chest tightening like a vise. "Tell me we're not jumping," he yells, the wind dragging his voice away. 

"Don't overthink it," Natasha says. She grabs his hand, squeezes it once, and jumps. 

He lands heavy next to her, right into a snowdrift, rolling forward with the impact. 

"Oof," she says, blowing her hair out of her eyes. "That was a lot less graceful than I planned. Ow."

"What'd you expect," Bucky says. He shifts with a wince; at least nothing's broken. 

"I thought I'd ask you. Seeing as how you have more experience, and all."

He blinks at her. 

"Shit," she says quickly. "Sorry. That was a little harsh."

But slowly, slowly, he smiles, and then grins, until he's laughing like a madman and she is too, exhausted and full of adrenaline and a sort of wild abandon in the snow. The distant pale lights of the train play over their bodies and then disappear, off into the unforgiving dark. 


	3. Chapter 3

He becomes aware of the fact that he’s bleeding, sluggishly and relentlessly, after half an hour of the two of them trudging through the dark.

It’s the glass that’s doing it; great shards of it still embedded in the soles of his feet that he didn’t have either the time or the presence of mind to remove earlier. Their presence stops his wounds from healing: instead they stay open, blood seeping out at a steady pace and soaking his borrowed thick socks, which aren’t thick enough to withstand the winter weather anyway. They shift in him as he walks and soon enough he’s limping, white-faced with jaw set, breath coming harshly and steaming in the dark. Natasha trudges along beside him, hood pulled up against the chill, one hand tucked under her armpit chasing warmth and the other cupping her phone, a little square of light that she keeps glancing at for instructions as they head in the direction of what is, at least theoretically, a road.

“I hate Switzerland,” Natasha says eventually, into the silence, because it actually is Switzerland that they’re in, after all.

Bucky grunts. “Better than Austria.”

There must be something snappish and suffering in his tone, because she looks at him strangely. “Someone’s having a bad—” she starts, and then, a second later with an unimpressed twist to her mouth: “You got hit, didn’t you.”

“Just glass in my foot,” Bucky says, tightly. “Won’t close up with ‘em still in there. Be fine.”

She puts her phone away. Its absence leaves them in real darkness; he blinks a few times against it before his vision adjusts.  “Clearly you learnt your definition of _fine_ from Steve,” she says, and he scowls. “Still got another couple miles before we hit a road. We’ll take the bike after that. Think you can manage till then?”

“Lady,” Bucky says, a little incredulously, “last time I was in this part of the world at this time of year it was 1945 and we were playin’ hide and seek with a Panzer division. I got glass in my foot and I’m bleedin’ all over a dead guy’s socks. Not gonna die. I’m fine.”

Natasha goes very quiet for a second. “Okay,” she says. “You’re fine. But you’re slowing me down,” and without another word to him she pulls his arm over her shoulders, and tucks him firmly against her side, her arm around his waist, and keeps walking.

“You got real funny ways of worrying about people,” Bucky says, into the quiet, after ten minutes of this.

“And you’re a lot—actually, no, you’re just as heavy as you look,” Natasha replies. “Ugh.”

After twenty minutes Bucky’s listing heavily against her shoulder, too tired and starved and uncomfortable to worry about their proximity. She’s as much a soldier as he is. She understands. The snow has stopped and the wind with it, and with the stillness comes new warmth.  But it’s been coming down for most of the night already; their feet sink into it with every awkward step. In the distance Bucky can make out lights; the far-off dark shapes of trees.

“Thank God for civilization,” Bucky mumbles, as they step together out of a snowbank and onto a road: a rural road, packed dirt with ice frozen in the ruts, but a road. “Where’s your ride?”

“I don’t know. It’s got autopilot, not a teleporter, you know.”

“’Scuse me for my ignorance of the twenty-first century,” Bucky says, and sags gratefully against the trunk of a tree by the road. “Thought you’d all have flying cars by now, anyway.”

“We do,” says Natasha, dropping down like a stone next to him. Ignoring Bucky’s staring she says, “Now that we have a proper fixed location the autopilot function on the bike should be able to find us, provided we stay still. Which is fine by me.”

“Flying cars,” Bucky says incredulously, under his breath, a few minutes later.

With nothing better to do, Bucky settles down with his back against the tree, blinking up at its leafless disconcerting branches, and the stars beyond, and lets his mind wander. He can hear Natasha breathing near him; feel the warmth radiating from her small body. His feet hurt. It is a good thing, to feel that: pain. The Soldier does not feel pain. He is hungry, too, and tired. All of these are things that do not occur to machines.

He thinks, with exasperation muted by exhaustion, of the last few hours, the last few months: it occurs to him that he doesn’t even know the date, and there is a not insignificant part of him that is too scared to ask. It was summer when he went under; a blustery tempestuous equatorial summer, distinguished from winter only by the presence of the monsoon, which comes in great torrents off the Indian Ocean and covers every single thing in a mist. Now it is winter. He used to try to track the passage of time in this way: noting the seasons, and the stars. Not much better than an animal. A memory lances through him like a needle.

_What year is it,_ comes his own voice, dull and cracking, from down inside the depths of him.

_I—what? Should he—should he really be asking that?_

_No. No, he shouldn’t. Turn up the voltage._

He makes a low and bestial noise and closes his eyes against the thought of it. There are some things you cannot run from. This he knows, now. _Когда он поднимается, силачи в страхе, совсем теряются от ужаса._ Whatever that means. It is clear that the dead woman intended for it to mean something. He should ask.

“Hey, listen,” Bucky says, before he can second-guess himself.

Natasha blinks at him. Her face is flushed and blotchy with either exertion or the cold, curious and cautious and as yet untouched by all of this, the mess that is his existence, and he finds he cannot continue.

“Thanks,” he says, instead. “For coming to get me.”

For a moment Natasha’s face does something strange. Then she looks down, and away. “Yeah, well. I didn’t do it for you.”

He's tired, so fucking tired, but the cold and the lingering traces of adrenaline in his system make it hard for him to get any rest, and he stays perfectly awake and perfectly still, staring down the tree-lined road and watching for a light. He sees it before she does, in the end, and nudges her in the ribs, clambering a little awkwardly to his feet.

"I guess this is our ride," he murmurs, watching the bike lumber growling like some aging beast up the track to them, headlamp on, riderless. It feels eerie; it feels like something out of an old story. "Jesus, that's creepy. Where'd you get it from? T'Challa?"

"Stark, actually," she says, crisply.

"Oh," Bucky says. He rolls his shoulder self-consciously, the one that is not attached to anything. 

"Yeah."

He settles down behind her on the bike, his arm around her small warm waist, both of them helmet-less and both of them just reckless enough to not really care, the wind whipping their hair about as they head out onto the dark strip of the highway, signposts looming illuminated out of the night every mile or so. After a while, the snow starts up again. He feels the cold in every part of him, down to the bone. The steady warmth of her presence jars him. He clings a little tighter. 

Natasha rolls the bike to a stop at one of those giant oversized twenty-four hour truck-stops, the sort that has a line of gas pumps and a small general store selling kitschy things to tourists and a diner. The sun is close to coming up; the place is almost deserted. They're right outside of Zug.

"Alright," Natasha says. "If anyone asks, we're tourists, but not American ones. Doing that 'Alpine getaway' thing that young couples with too much time and money do. How's your German?"

"I've been told it's okay," says Bucky, switching seamlessly and flawlessly from English. She favors him with a little smile, the first in hours, shakes her hair out of its ponytail, and heads inside.

The first thing she buys is a first aid kit: a small one, meant for travelling. "Go get that out of your foot," she says, nodding in the direction of the bathroom. "We can stay here for breakfast; you look like you're about to faint. What do you want?"

"Uh," he says, taking it from her. Really he needs four or five thousand calories daily, to stay comfortable, with his metabolism. "Everything?"

The bathroom is unisex, and with just one stall: which means it's lockable. He's never been more grateful.

Bucky clicks the door shut and perches, after some consideration, on the edge of the sink, setting the first aid kit down beside him. He tugs his boots off with a wince; the socks take more work, and have to be peeled off slowly, coming away with a sucking sound. They're soaked through and dark with blood. He balances his left foot on his knee to take a look: he can see at least two shards large enough to grab with his bare hands--hand--jutting out of his heel, shining with the copper-orange of dried blood in the harsh light, and God knows how many smaller pieces. 

"God, Barnes," he says to himself, reaching for the tweezers, "you're a fuckin' piece of work. Ow. Jesus." 

When he limps back out a while later later it's to find Natasha seated at a table by the window, drinking tea and leafing through a newspaper, a frankly mouth-watering array of food spread out before her. He slides into the seat opposite to her, eyes as big as saucers. 

"Ordered you breakfast," says Natasha, not looking up. "Everything, like you asked. Except the croissant. That's for me. Patch yourself up okay?"

Bucky blinks at the food laid out in front of him. There's bacon, and eggs, and a couple thick slices of ham, and sausages shining with grease. Hunks of dark bread spread with butter; slices of cold meat and smoked cheeses. Jams in little dishes: black cherry, apricot, strawberry. Pulpy orange juice, and coffee. He hasn't seen this much food since--well, ever, probably. "Jesus Christ," he says. "Uh. Yes. Yeah, I'm--I'm fine. Can I eat all of this? I'm going to eat all of this."

"Go right ahead," says Natasha. "T'Challa gave me this credit card. Got you a pack of cigarettes, too. Figured you'd be getting cravings pretty soon."

He doesn't ask her how she knew he was a smoker. Everyone deserves a few secrets. 

“So where are we headed next,” Bucky says later around a mouthful of eggs, and doesn’t realize until after he’s said it that he said _we,_ not _I,_ that already he is taking her presence for granted. She’s well within her rights to leave him here, unknown debts be damned.

But she just shrugs. “The railway line here—the one we had so much fun on earlier—terminates in Milan. Or Lucerne, depending what route you take.”

He studies the map she has just slid across the table to him. It’s charmingly old-fashioned; he wonders if she’s doing it just for his benefit. “I guess we’re not going to Milan, then.”

“Shame,” says Natasha. “I always wanted to spend a Christmas in Italy.”

Bucky looks up, startled.

“It’s the thirteenth already,” she tells him. “You should read the paper.”

“Oh,” he says. There's tinsel strung about garishly around the edge of the front counter; lights dangling above them. He's tired. He should have noticed. “Sorry.”

Her lips quirk. “Don’t be. What do you think I’m usually doing for Christmas, opening presents with the family and putting out cookies for Santa? Last year I wasted three hours trying to teach our adopted teenage daughter and a robot about the benefits of alcoholic eggnog. Besides, I usually still save my celebrating for New Year’s.”

Bucky laughs. “Old habits, huh,” he says.

“Old habits,” she agrees, something a little sad to it, and takes another sip of her tea.

The waitress interrupts them, then, coming over with Natasha’s order. “For you, ma’am,” she says in accented German, and sets the plate down.

It’s like a switch is flipped inside Natasha. “Oh, thank you,” she says, with a sunny smile all full of teeth, and if you weren’t watching for the tightness around her eyes you’d really think she meant it, the conversation she slips seamlessly into with the server after that. She’s better than Bucky expected.

“Impressive,” Bucky says, once they’re alone again. He blinks at Natasha’s plate. “Uh. What is that?”

“ _Palatschinken,”_ Natasha answers idly, and picks up a little pot of black cherry jam to spread over her crepes. There’s sugar with them, too, and heavy cream and slivers of almonds. He’s never wanted something more in his life.

“I’m getting some,” he decides, vicious. He loves making his own decisions, sometimes.

“That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.”

Bucky stares.

“Second most disgusting,” Natasha amends. “Are you really going to eat all of that?”

“Lady,” Bucky says with something very close to glee, spooning more Nutella onto his pancakes and then, as an afterthought, smearing the rest onto his bacon, “there are a lotta things wrong with the twenty-first century, but this ain’t one of them. I am absolutely gonna eat all of this. I’ll eat this shit outta the jar. Watch me.”

“Please don’t,” says Natasha.

“If you’re quite finished,” Natasha says ten minutes later, watching Bucky attack his ham in much the same way as a lion might attack an impala, “I’m thinking we’ll head for Paris. I have a safehouse there, and they’ll be expecting us to head into Italy, not France. We can lie low for a few days; plan our next move. We’ll have to ditch the bike, though. Might have traced the plates. I’ll get us a car.”

“Paris, huh?” Bucky says thoughtfully. “Never been to Paris. Not since the Liberation, anyway.”

He’s preoccupied enough with his food that he doesn’t notice the look Natasha gives him, quiet and small and sad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, I lied; I'm deliberately referencing canon established in the Red Room fic now. You still don't have to read it to enjoy this. 
> 
> Also: yes, the Switzerland-to-Paris December escape is a reference to exactly what you think it is.


	4. Chapter 4

“You know, when you said you were gonna get us a car,” says Bucky, “this somehow wasn’t what I had in mind.”

Natasha grunts. From this angle he can really only see her legs, sticking out of the car door as she twists at an awkward angle to pry paneling away from the dashboard and get at the wiring. They’re in a thoroughly empty underground car-park, the sort of lonely urban place tourists and students leave their cars overnight after an evening spent drinking entirely too much to drive home. It’s maybe five in the morning. Bucky leans against a concrete pillar, keeping watch.

“Welcome to the wonderful world of being an internationally wanted terrorist, Barnes,” Natasha says, muffled by the screwdriver held between her teeth. “You’re more than a little…recognizable. You know, we should fix that. How do you feel about getting a haircut?”

“And you’re not?” he retorts, ignoring the question. He’s not about to let her anywhere near his face with scissors.

“I’m on the run because I tased a monarch. You’re on the run for murdering one. There’s a difference.”

He grits his teeth at the phrasing. “I didn’t do that.”

“Tell that to CNN,” she says. He hears an electric _click_ and then the stuttering rumble of the engine starting. She shuffles into a sitting position. “It’s not so bad, you know.”

Her voice has gone strange. He looks up and over. “What is?”

“Living day to day,” she says. She’s gotten out of the car now, setting her screwdriver and a half-used roll of duct tape down on its roof. Old beat-up four-wheel drive, probably white when it was new. Mid-nineties, at least. Hot-wiring it wouldn’t have been so easy, otherwise. She is not looking at him. “Being someone else for a while. It’s not so bad, once you get used to it.”

“Is that what you’re doing?” Bucky asks.

He sees her smile, quick and sharp, before she moves away to start swapping out the plates. At least she knows what she’s doing. “I guess I am. Shame. I liked being Natasha Romanoff. She liked old movies and Pixy Stix.” She shrugs. “It was nice.”

Bucky doesn’t know her well, not at all, but he knows enough to be aware of the significance of what she’s just said. “You don’t have to—give everything up. I’m still—me.”

Her gaze could cut glass. “Are you?”

He feels like they’re having a conversation he only understands half of. “Some days.”

“Some days,” she repeats, as if to herself, and then gets to her feet again, the plates secured. Her body language is all wrong. She smirks with false cheer. “Okay, Bucky Barnes. Hop in. Unless you want to walk to France.”

They’ve been on the road for two hours before she says anything else. The intermittent snow has started up again, light flurries brushing against the windshield, sky heavy and grey. The radio is playing in the background: something low and staticky and sad; all harmonica and mournful tones. Bucky presses his cheek to the passenger side window, dozing. “So,” she starts, “where’d you get a name like _Bucky,_ anyway? Please don’t say your parents.”

He blinks back to proper consciousness; looks at her in silence for a long moment. “Steve,” he says.

“Ah,” she says, and then, “He told me you two met as kids.”

It’s an implicit request for information. Bucky knows how this works. “I was ten. He was—” He shakes his head at the memory, fond. “He was the terror of the fuckin’ neighbourhood, chip on his shoulder size of a goddamned mountain, you know? Always railin’ against something. Bit off more than he could chew one day. Saw him getting the shit kicked outta him by some pack of brats. Chased ‘em off and walked him home. He hated every fucking second of it. Hated me, too, for about a week. Then he didn’t.”

“So why _Bucky_?”

He shrugs. “There were three or four Jimmies on the block back then. Steve hated all of them.”

“Your real name is _Jimmy_?” She sounds delighted.

“No!” he says, affronted. “It’s James. James Buchanan.”

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

“No wonder you spend all your time hanging around a guy who calls himself Captain America,” she says.

“I had patriotic parents,” says Bucky.

“Hm,” she says, focusing on the grey expanse of the highway strip. They’re driving into the sun but it’s barely visible behind the fog, pale gold slanting through and highlighting every tiny imperfection on the windshield, every stain. The man on the radio sings about how, sounding awful cut up about it,  _the winter wind is blowin' strong, and my hands have got no gloves._ “James. It’s a good name.”

It’s all she says for a long time.

He must drift off without meaning to, lulled by the warmth from the air-conditioning, which is running as hot as it can go, or maybe from the gentle movement of the road under them, the low crackle of the radio. He’s comfortable, and warm, and well-fed, and nobody’s trying to kill him just yet. It makes for a pleasant change. Whatever the reason, he sleeps. For once he is too exhausted to dream. He wakes up to Natasha’s voice in his ear.

“James,” she says. “Wake up. C’mon. We’re here.”

He gets out of the car with only a little awkwardness and follows her, up the steps of the apartment building. It’s six storeys—he counts them; neck craned back—and old, very old, soot-stained brick with ancient traces of broadsides painted on the sides, advertising soap, condoms, cigarettes. There are little cast-iron balconies at each front window, rickety and rusting and unreliable. It feels like the old brownstones he grew up near. It feels like a thing from another era.  So does he.

“You live here?” Bucky asks, and Natasha says, “Sometimes.”

They go up a steep staircase inside, the steps worn in the center from decades of foot traffic, to the fifth floor. She has to use three separate keys on the door at the end of the hall before it creaks open. He wonders who she is so afraid of. 

The inside is in stark contrast to the aging façade of the exterior. It’s been completely torn up and renovated at some point in the last—five years, he thinks, going by the architectural trends. The original fireplace is still in situ, but the rest is new: all gleaming white plaster and floor paneled in light-colored wood. The kitchen bench-top is pale marble. The television is bigger and thinner than any television ought to be. She doesn’t have much furniture, though: a few bookcases (well-stocked); a plush cream sofa and matching armchairs; a coffee table that, he’s pretty sure, is actually just one big slab of granite with glass over it. A purple dressing gown is draped haphazardly over the back of one of the chairs: a little touch of domesticity; proof that she does live here, sometimes.

“Wow,” he says, turning in a circle to admire—well, everything.

“Living for five years on Tony Stark’s payroll had its benefits,” Natasha says, dry. She sets her keys down on the kitchen counter. “Besides. It’s Vincennes. If you want to stay alive and undetected, in this business, you have to live like a local. And the locals here are very, very rich.”

“Obviously,” says Bucky. He feels woefully out of place: but Natasha, with her neatly styled copper curls and fashionably thin motorcycle jacket and expensive boots, fits in seamlessly.

"Bedroom is in here," she says, thumbing at the closed door of the sole other room. "Shower, too. Which, no offence," she adds, glancing at him, "you're definitely going to be using before I let you anywhere near my bed. I like to think I still have standards."

Bucky blinks. "Uh," he says. 

She catches sight of his face and snorts. "Yes, in the bed. While I'm on the couch. For all I know you might clean up real pretty, but 'blood-spattered and homeless' doesn't usually do much for me, thanks."

He's definitely blood-spattered. He supposes an argument could be made for 'homeless', too. There's a helluva lot he could say to that, but for some reason what comes out is, "So what does?"

Natasha arches an eyebrow at him. "Careful, Soldier. You keep that up and you might just end up sounding something like Bucky Barnes. I've heard the stories about you."

He can't quite tell if she's flirting with him or not; her expression is secretive but there is warmth in it. Emboldened, he says, "They tell stories about me?"

"They do," she affirms, opening first the fridge and then the freezer to peer inside. "Ice cubes and Gatorade. Great. Gonna have to go out. There's this felafel place a block away I've been meaning to try. Yeah, they tell stories about you. About your--charm, anyway." She favors him with a smirk. "You know, when I first joined SHIELD, it was Margaret Carter who debriefed me? She was still working in those days. Had quite a few things to say about you, believe me. We can chat _all_ about it later."

Shit. He swallows, all bravado forgotten.

Natasha leaves shortly after, and Bucky is alone in the apartment, with only his own thoughts for company. 

("To get some dinner," she says, twirling her key-ring around one finger. "Don't know about you, but I haven't eaten since five this morning. I'm about ready to keel over. And," here she eyes him with a disapproving twist to her lips, "I'll get you a change of clothes or two while I'm at it. Those don't fit you. Plus they stink. Get in the shower while I'm gone. Don't think I've got anything that'll fit in the meantime, but there's a dressing-gown in with the linens that I pretty much swim in. Might work for now."

"You callin' me fat?" he says.

"Well, you're not exactly small," she says, and Bucky isn't sure whether he imagines the smirk on her face as she heads out the door.)

Unsure of what else to do he opens the door of the other room. A shower might help clear his head. Natasha's bedroom is much the same as the rest of the apartment, as it turns out: minimalist and clean, queen-sized bed with grey quilt taking up most of the space, with a dresser and bedside table and tall lamp in one corner. The shower in the ensuite is all frosted glass and chrome. There’s a tub, too, deep and over-sized, half-used tealights perched on the edges. Bucky can't remember seeing luxury on this scale before. Not luxury he was allowed to partake of, anyway.

Bucky feels faintly like an intruder, but he grabs a towel from the rack and braces himself against the sink to pull his boots off. He's got the water running--as hot as it will go; the worst thing about his safehouse in Bucharest, honestly, was that the hot water tended to cut out suddenly when it was there at all--and is about to step in when he catches sight of himself in the fogged-over mirror. 

He frowns. Then he stands there, steam dampening his hair and heat making his skin prick with sweat, and looks at his naked body. He looks--rough, for lack of a better word. His old scars show up more clearly in winter weather, the lines of them darkening. Most of them are knife-wounds, clean curved lines from glancing blows. Some are the puckered circles of bullet holes. One, on his hip, is a burn; the kind so bad the healed skin is pale and shining. He does not remember receiving it. It is very neat. It is very deliberate. It has many smaller siblings, in other easy to hide places. Cigarette marks.

Bucky shivers, though he is not cold. 

He runs his fingers over his ribs: first on the right side, feeling for a badly-healed break he knows is there, that he got in a bad wreck in Havana in the '70s; and then on the left, where it is not bone he is feeling at all. His fingers move of their own accord up his side, to the knots of white scar tissue that mark where they pulled his skin over the underlying steel. He twists his lips and carefully unwinds the fabric from what's left of the metal. He supposes the stump's an ugly thing. He only started covering it when he saw the miserable hangdog way Steve looked at it. _Well,_ he thinks. _If I was Steve I'd look at me like that too._ Where is Steve now? Safe, he supposes. That's all that matters. All that ever mattered.

He sighs; runs his fingers across the ragged fraying edge of the stump, all twisted from the heat, or the memory of it. His thumb catches on something sharp. Blood wells up and he lets it drip; shuffles into the shower stall without a backwards glance. 

He cleans himself quick and perfunctory--soldier-like, he thinks, and laughs to himself--because it's still hard for him, to accept that he has time, that he ain't got nothing to fret over now. They used to wash him down with a hose, at Novaya Zemlya. When they did it at all. He remembers that. At least here he can clean his hair properly. He samples three of Natasha's sizable collection of shampoos, and settles on the least offensively floral: something faintly gritty and smelling of sea-spray. Probably cost a small fortune. The heat beats down on his back, reddening his skin. 

It is almost enough to hurt.

After, he wraps himself in the dressing-gown Natasha mentioned, which is far too big for her and ends up being slightly too small for him, and besides that is too thin for this sort of weather. He doesn't have anything else to wear, though, so that's alright. 

Bucky finds himself feeling abruptly lost once this is done; unmoored and uncertain. There is a part of him that balks at a life without instructions. He paces for a while, and considers the exits, the vantage points, the best places to hold a last stand. He is not so naive to think that there is no chance of holding one here. He opens the kitchen drawers to count the number of things that might be lethal, in his hands, should it come to that. He finds a false bottom in the middle one. There is a half-dozen passports and a hefty bundle of euros secreted inside. There's a handgun taped underneath the counter, also. 

She's not stupid. He hopes she won't end up dead because of him. 

He turns the TV on, after that, and flips through channels idly: pausing first for the news, which only upsets him and says nothing about Steve, and then on some cooking show, which just reminds him how hungry he is. It gets tiring quickly. He browses Natasha's bookshelves looking for something to pass the time. She is a terrifyingly intellectual sort of reader, he realizes, when he runs his finger along the spines: Derrida, Frantz, Foucault. Others he doesn't recognize. Collections from Pushkin, Blok, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva. The Pushkin, when he pulls it out, ends up being a collection of fairy tales for little kids, untranslated but richly illustrated. It seems so unlike her--the fabled Black Widow--that at first he has to laugh. 

Then he thinks that maybe he just doesn't know her at all. Does anyone?

Perturbed, he puts it back.

When he hears the key rattle in the lock again he's relocated to the sofa, too nervous to either rest or focus on anything. The TV is on low; a weathered dark-skinned man on it is gesturing at olive trees. He fumbles for the remote to mute it just as Natasha strides in, says, "Honey, I'm home," and hefts bags up onto the counter. 

"Good day at the office?" Bucky asks, getting to his feet to help her. He might be a lamed and battle-shy old warhorse, a rifle that won't fire right, it's true: but he still has his fuckin' manners, and he'll go to his grave with them. 

"The very best," says Natasha, and hands him a black bag from some high-end joint. "That's for you."

"Oh," he says. "How much I owe you?"

She snorts. "Nothing. Don't go all martyr on me, they're just clothes. I'll get dinner sorted. Go get changed."

 Natasha has a good eye; the clothes fit well. They're nothing fancy, but they're still better than anything he's owned before: sleep pants and t-shirts in neutral tones; a few sweaters that look far warmer than anything he's used to; a pair of ridiculously soft hoodies a little too big for him. A black jacket that he thinks might be real leather; he whistles and then winces at the price tag. There's a knife packed at the bottom of the bag: a good knife, strong and sharp, with a nice solid grip. He smiles. It is the most welcome gift of all.

He goes for one of the hoodies in the end, the black one, with the knife hidden in the front pocket, and a pair of sweatpants. He's not trying to impress anyone. He just wants to stay warm. 

Natasha's milling around in the kitchen when he comes back out. "There you are." She slides a felafel sandwich in a steaming paper bag down the counter to him. "Got you extra large. Didn't know if you'd prefer yogurt or tahini, though. Went with tahini."

"Thanks," he says, hesitating. "Look, don't suppose you could, uh--help me pin this sleeve up. I mean. I'd, uh, do it myself, but I dunno where you keep that stuff, so--" He shrugs one-shouldered.

"Oh," she says. She sounds startled. "Shit, sorry. Yeah. Hang on; I'll get something."

"You know," says Natasha, muffled by the safety pins she's holding in her mouth, "I take it back. You really do clean up good."

He laughs, and shifts. She is standing very close to him, hand on his busted shoulder, and all his imperfections are clear, under the harsh bathroom light. 

Bucky is finishing off his dinner with all the grace of a starving mongrel when Natasha leans forward on the sofa, looking at him, and says, "Well. Guess I'd better get some blankets together." She smirks to herself; pats the cushion next to her. "Been a long time since I slept on this old thing. Don't have guests much."

He blinks. "Not about to let you sleep on the sofa," he says.

"Why not?"

"Because," Bucky says, stupidly. 

"Because  _what_?" 

"Because," he says again. "It's not--it's not what you do, when you're stayin' someplace new. I'm your guest."

Her mouth curls up. He's learning, pretty quickly, that this is the expression she makes when she's really entertained. Her fake smile is broader. "Your mama teach you that, Bucky boy?"

"You bet she did. She'll be rollin' in her grave tonight if I let you sleep out here, lady."

"Lady," she repeats, amused. 

He shrugs.

"Alright." She leans back. "Play the gentleman if you want, fine. I'm warning you though, this sofa is fucking awful."

It sort of is, actually. But Natasha throws a few pillows down and piles blankets into his arms--"Clouds are going; it'll be cold tonight," she says--and it's okay, really. He's slept much worse places. 

She goes to bed early. Not to sleep, he thinks. Probably she just wants some space. But it ain't like he has anything better to do to pass the time, and so he does, too, turning all the lights off and wrapping himself up in the heavy blankets, which smell of dust, like they've been in the closet for a long while. The light under her door stays on for a long time. He wonders if she ever gets lonely. 

He does.

So sleep comes to him uneasily, and when it does the dream comes with it. 

The dream, he says, like it is a title: and it might as well be. It is the only one he ever has, after all. Bucky starts to feel almost like they're friends, him and the girl. They might be. There are a lot of things he still can't remember.

Still: it is a poor kind of friend who kills you, slowly and sweetly and with great glee, every time you meet. She cuts his heart out this time, nice and careful and slow, with the wind rushing madly in his ears. She has to put both her small hands over the pommel of the knife to break his breastbone and get at the meat inside. He comes out of it choking on a sob and sweating, eyes snapping open, when she pulls his ribs apart and sticks her hand inside, red up to the wrist. 

"Fuck," he pants. His hand is curled so damn tight around his newly-acquired knife that it hurts to let go. He swipes at his face, unsurprised and a little ashamed to feel the wetness there. The room is still dark. If he cried out, Natasha didn't hear him. He tends to dream quiet. 

Bucky twists around on the sofa and pulls the blankets up to his ears, pressing his face into the pillow. He forces himself to breathe easy. Counts them. In, out. In, out. 

Eventually he falls again into a fitful exhausted sleep.

When he wakes again it is to another nightmare: but it is not his own.

He startles awake on an instinct, the sort of instinct that says _something is wrong something is wrong run_ , and he almost does, hand curled silently around the knife Natasha gave him, but then he forces himself to lie there and listen. Night-time noises of fighting dogs and far-off traffic, and the ticking of the clock in the kitchen: and underneath it, the soft but unmistakeable cries of an animal in pain. This is what woke him. He knows that sound. He’s woken up choking on it often enough.

He lets go of the knife and pushes the blankets away; moves silently to the bedroom doorway.

Natasha is curled up on her side in the bed, looking small and oddly vulnerable there bunched up under the coverlets, caught up in a dream. Her breath comes too fast. She’s tense and twitching, her hands clenched into fists. She mouths something over and over again, tossing her head, and it takes him a second to figure out what it is: _no._ Just _no._ Bucky hesitates. He’s never seen someone else suffering like this before.

But then she makes a quiet and distressed noise, like you do when you’ve been wounded and you know you’ll only win the fight if you hide it, and he steps closer. “Natasha.”

No answer. He tries again, voice low. “Natasha.”

When she still doesn’t wake he goes to stand by the bed. “Natasha, hey, wake up,” he says, and when that doesn’t work he puts his hand on her shoulder. “Natasha, you’re dreaming. Wake up.”

Her eyes snap open and she stares at him, panicked and unseeing and pupils a little blown, and he has just enough time to think _shit that’s not good_ before she snarls and grabs his hand and _tugs_ , pulling him off-balance with surprising strength before he can think to brace himself, his brain still expecting the counterweight of the arm.

The second he stumbles she’s on him, like some fucking half-crazed wild creature. He’s tired and missing his primary weapon—or any weapons at all, actually—and it’s plain she’s working on autopilot, chillingly familiar. She knocks him down easily. She’s trying to pin him. _Fuck._ He rolls with the impact, programming kicking in, and flips them. “Natasha,” he tries, but she growls and kicks him hard in the sternum and flips them again, and he finds himself lying absolutely deathly still underneath her on the floor, the sharp line of a knife digging into his jaw.

She stares wild-eyed at him, breathing fast. He does not struggle. The whole thing lasts no more than a few seconds.

“We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” Bucky says.

She blinks. For one long moment neither of them speaks, their breathing the only sound in the quiet dark of the room. Bucky feels winded. Then she’s off him in an instant, scrambling back and away with the smallest of sounds, knife forgotten.

“Shit,” she says, and clambers to her feet. “Shit shit shit shit _shit._ ”

Bucky coughs. “You were dreaming,” he says, pushing himself up with his elbow. “Shouldn’t—shouldn’t have touched you. Sorry.”

She doesn’t say anything. She’s breathing hard, shoulder pressed to the far wall, the hand that held the knife clenching and unclenching.

“I should know better,” says Bucky.

Nothing.

“Sorry,” Bucky says again. He uses the bedframe to pull himself to his feet.

Natasha laughs and it’s a horrible sound, like sheet metal and barbed wire, like injured birds. “Don’t— _you’re_ sorry—of course you’re—”she says, and then stops.

Bucky waits.

Natasha pushes herself away from the wall and walks calmly to the middle of the room, kneeling to pick up the forgotten knife. Her hair is in her eyes; the pale yellow-white light from the streetlamps outside splashes the floor with color where the curtains have shifted. “I’m sorry,” she says, and offers the blade to him, hilt-first. He takes it even though he is unsure. “I’m going to sleep on the couch. You can stay in here.”

“I’m not tired,” Bucky says, not really knowing why. It feels important. It feels like something Steve would do.

She looks at him and he can’t really see her expression, in the dark. “So count sheep,” she says. Her voice has regained its usual tone. He wouldn’t have thought anything was amiss, if she hadn’t just tried to put a knife in his throat.

Bucky licks his lips. “I usually go for a walk, after,” he says, hoping she understands what he means.

She does. She pauses. “You too, huh? How often?”

“Often enough,” he says. “Mind if I turn on the light?”

He does it without waiting for her to answer. Then he sits on the edge of the bed, up near the pillows, and after a moment she sits down too, at the other end, looking ready to run. They look at each other.  Bucky says, “You don’t seem like a Pushkin sorta girl.”

“What?”

“I looked through your bookshelves. I got bored. Pushkin, really?”

She blinks at him and then smiles, faintly and with some wonder, like she can’t believe this is a conversation they’re having. “We going to pretend like I didn’t have a knife to your carotid artery five minutes ago?”

“Well,” Bucky says. “I figure it makes us even.”

She huffs a little laugh. "It does seem to be a recurring motif, doesn't it. Sorry."

"So am I," he says, and then, not wanting her to get caught up in it again, "So. Ol' Aleksandr Sergeyevich, huh?"

“Right." She makes that half-laugh again. "Well. When I was growing up it was…considered proper, for a girl like me to have a decent education. Nobody ever made me. But girls who did the proper thing lived longer than girls who didn't. Besides. I do like Pushkin, actually. Especially the fairy stories.” She shrugs. “I've always liked those the best. It’s the unreality of it all. The escapism. You know?”

“You wanted to go chasing firebirds? Marry a bear?"

"No," she says. "I wanted to be the bear."

They talk for a little while longer: nothing serious, just pointless little anecdotes and lighthearted arguments over literature. She's fond of Tolstoy, he finds, and prefers prose to poetry, and German novels over French, even if others say they're too dour. It's strange to talk to her in the way two ordinary people might; she speaks with a cautiousness that says she's just as surprised. 

There's a spooked-colt air about her still, but some of it fades as the minutes go by. The line of her shoulders relaxes; the tenseness in her spine eases away. When she shivers halfway through a story Bucky realizes they're still both in their sleeping clothes and clears his throat, suddenly aware of the hour. 

"I should go," he says, and gets to his feet. "Let you sleep."

"Don't," Natasha says. "I mean, uh. You don't--shit. You don't have to."

He doesn't know which of the two of them looks more surprised by this. "I--um," Bucky starts to say. 

"That couch is shit," Natasha says, recovering first. "I should know; I got it on sale. Wake up with a crick in your neck every time."

"Sounds terrible," Bucky says, slowly. 

"It is," says Natasha. 

Unsure, Bucky sits back down. They look at each other. It's Natasha who breaks first. 

"You know what," she says, and looks away. "Forget it. I'm--not having a good night. I could hurt you." 

"No you couldn't," says Bucky.

So without another word Natasha looks at him, and shuffles slowly up the bed, pulling the corner of the heavy duvets back to settle underneath them. She blinks at him with what might be mistaken by a person less knowledgeable about these things as complacence, as calm. Bucky lets out a breath he hadn't known he was holding and goes awkwardly around to the other side. He slips underneath the blankets silently, and stares up at the ceiling, holding himself carefully so as not to accidentally touch her. At least the bed's big enough that there's room. She flicks the light off.

After five or ten minutes of silence, the only noise their breathing, Natasha says, "God, I feel like we're an old Puritan couple."

Bucky laughs, startled, and when he hears her roll over onto her side facing him he turns his head to look. Her eyes are bright and curious in the dark. "If we were Puritans we wouldn't be here," he says. "Gotta make an honest man of me first."

She smiles wide all of a sudden, and he's almost certain it's genuine. "Thanks," she says. "For--staying."

"'s okay," Bucky says, a little softer. "Thanks for bustin' me outta my icebox."

"Guess they still had those when you were growing up, huh?"

"Yeah. Used to get these big blocks delivered for 'em. Pain in the ass lugging those things up the stairs, lemme tell you. Stevie'd tried, he'd'a snapped himself in half."

"Stevie," she repeats, more thoughtful than mocking.

He clears his throat. "Sorry. Forget--forget who I'm talkin' to."

"Don't be," she says, and then, "He really loves you, you know."

"Think he loves you too," Bucky says before he can stop himself. 

It must be the wrong thing to say, though, because Natasha rolls onto her back to consider the ceiling, and says, "Maybe. You should try and get some sleep. It's late."

 Bucky knows a dismissal when he hears one. He rolls over onto his side, so that he's lying on his real arm and not the stump--it digs into his skin otherwise, he has found--and blinks at the wall, at the window, at the soft light coming through. The sun will be up soon. The sky is a hesitant heather-gray. He curls in on himself and closes his eyes. 

He's already drifting off when he feels Natasha shift closer, her toes brushing his calf and her breath on the back of his neck. They're close enough to touch. He doesn't say anything about it, though, not a thing.

This time, when he sleeps, he does not dream. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some notes for the detail-oriented: the song playing on the radio is Dylan's "Kingsport Town". Guess why.
> 
> Bucky and Natasha's discussion about marrying bears is a reference to "East of the Sun and West of the Moon"; which, although not Russian, forms part of a long tradition of Eastern European folk tales involving shapeshifting bears. Typically these stories are Beauty and the Beast-type analogues wherein our heroine frees a wayward prince trapped in the shape of a bear: or, alternately, discovers she can love him despite his unfortunately ursine behaviour. A lesser-known, alternate variant has the heroine as the one who turns into a bear, to escape an unwanted suitor/hideous ogre.
> 
> I'm still salty, what can I say.


End file.
